I have emailled yourself and Steve several times over the past few years, but never got a response, yea or nea. The articles have been unavailable for quite some time and I get a steady trickle of queries about identifying early printings. Rather than send people away with a sorry can't help answer, it just seems more useful to let them have a shortened version of the guides. Once you have TC back in print I will of course point people in your direction to obtain back issues.

If having the text here is a problem I am sure that Jeremy will delete/edit as required.

Deagol, although we admit to not being the best of correspondents over the past few years, while finishing complicated books and household renovations and dealing with health issues, according to our files we've happily answered a number of your messages, none of which (that we received, anyway) was a request to post a version of Steve's guides. (Of course, we can't speak for Steve, who we know has moved house and jobs in recent years and is relatively less active in Tolkien circles.) In any case, neither the lack of a reply nor the fact that something is temporarily out of print is justification for posting copyrighted material without permission to a public site, as opposed to private communication. The privilege of putting Steve's articles on the Web, if it were to be done, should be his, and ours.

Khamul, we did take your comment as tongue in cheek. We get a lot of requests for back issues -- just about every new subscriber wants the complete set (oh, these collectors!) -- and will honour them as soon as possible. Since the Tolkien Collector went on hiatus at the end of 2002, we've changed computer hardware and software, and our original setup became functionally obsolete. So Wayne is having to shift and revise all of the files, which takes time but will make reprinting much easier when it's all done.

That's alrighty then! With that cold blue coloured quotation, I was imagining an angry Hammond banging away on his keyboard! (-did you ever have a Hammond typewriter before computers?...)

...But if the software has to change (perhaps with format changes); mabey different paper too; and these were always going to be 'reprints'; that means these back issues arereally going to be second state! ( ) What's a collector to do!?

oh, these collectors! Yeh! I wonder what kind of people encourage these kind of folk! Publishing magazines and books of publishing and printing minutiae; feeding their secret vice...

BH

Posted on: 2008/12/2 5:15

_________________You drive a hard bargain – you can have it for £10 all-in – one consolation (for you) is that you do not have to hear the cries of my children, for bread...